Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West Reviews

In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, an American buffalo herd once numbering 30 million animals was reduced to twenty-three. It was the era of Manifest Destiny, a gilded age that viewed the West as nothing more than a treasure chest of resources to be dug up or shot down. Supporting hide hunters was the U.S. Army, which considered the eradication of the buffalo essential to victory in its ongoing war on Native Americans. Into that maelstrom rode young George Bird Grinnell. A scientist and a journalist, a hunter and a conservationist, Grinnell would lead the battle to save the buffalo from extinction. Fighting in the pages of magazines, in Washington’s halls of power, and in the frozen valleys of Yellowstone, Grinnell and

Considering George Bird Grinnell’s impact on conservation, fair treatment of the American Indian, and the national park movement – and those are but three of his many accomplishments – the lack of a full biography of his life seems downright peculiar. Since I first ran into his name more than a decade ago when I moved into an apartment building named Grinnell and wondered who or what “Grinnell” was, I have often pondered why I didn’t learn about George Bird Grinnell in school. Surely, his life is as interesting and his contribution to America is as significant as that of Buffalo Bill (whose path he crossed). Consider, this man founded the first Audubon Society, explored Glacier National Park, and would have accompanied Custer at his last stand, except his professor needed his services for the summer at Yale!

Until now, the most complete exploration of Grinnell’s life – excluding the unpublished, autobiographical “Memories” which resides in original at Yale and in copy or microfilm in several other libraries – was John F. Reiger’s “The Passing of the Great West.” Reiger allowed Grinnell to speak for himself, filling out the picture with supplementary writings by and about him. Gerald Diettert’s “Grinnell’s Glacier: George Bird Grinnell and Glacier National Park” focuses on one period in Grinnell’s life and William T. Hagan’s “Theodore Roosevelt and Six Friends of the Indian” (Grinell was one of the six “friends”), focuses on one facet of it. Grinnell’s own writings reveal much about him. He was a prolific writer with a keen eye for detail, but his writings with an autobiographical slant are either difficult to obtain, like “Memories,” or scattered in various places, such as magazine articles about his home in Audubon Park or the semi-autobiographical series of “Jack” adventure books, which he presumably wrote for his nieces and nephews to acquaint them with the “olden days.”

While Michael Punke’s “Last Stand: George Bird Grinell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West” is not a complete biography of Grinnell, it is a thorough examination of Grinnell’s development from a wealthy and somewhat aimless young man to a mature thinker who grasped the concept of animal extinction and found in himself both the perseverance and tools to combat it.

As Punke succinctly states, “If there were two moral poles in the world of George Bird Grinnell, Cornelius Vanderbilt stood at one of them” and Lucy Audubon, the widow of naturalist and painter, John James Audubon, stood at the other. Punke develops this theme confidently and convincingly throughout his book. Lucy Audubon, who was Grinnell’s first teacher and near neighbor in what was then known as Audubon Park, taught him the value of self-denial, which is at the heart of conservation: deny today and preserve so that future generations may enjoy. True, Grinnell probably learned similar lessons from his father, whose reputation remained untarnished and unchallenged (except in the “Brooklyn Eagle”) despite two bankruptcies and extended, close business dealings with Cornelius Vanderbilt, the granddaddy of robber barons, but in his later writings, Grinnell gives ample credit to “Grandma” Audubon for her early moral lessons.

Punke is admirable in his ability to keep the various threads of his story moving along simultaneously. Grinnell’s maturation, the United States government’s subjugation of the American Indian, the near extinction of the buffalo, and the establishment of Yellowstone Park all develop simultaneously, no strand slighted in favor of another. Punke’s writing is clear and energetic and his knowledge of the subject matter is extensive.

Occasionally, he misstates a fact; for example, substituting the firm of George B. Grinnell & Co for George Bird Grinnell & Co (George Blake Grinnell did his son a disservice when he named him George Bird – one George B Grinnell too many) and, occasionally he misses an interesting point. September 18, 1873, the day George Bird Grinnell & Co crashed, essentially freeing Grinnell from business and allowing him to return to Yale and embark upon the course that led him west, was the same day that Lucy Audubon, Grinnell’s mentor, departed New York City for the last time, returning to Louisville, Kentucky, where she died several months later.

Those bits are tangential, however. This is a splendid book, a welcome addition to the literature about the founding father of American conservation and a very interesting read.
Matthew Spady […].

By 1902, the US Army estimated that only 23 wild buffalo remained alive in Yellowstone National Park – the pitiful remnants of the massive herds that once blanketed America.

How the buffalo came to teeter on the brink of extinction is the subject of Last Stand by Michael Punke – a gripping historical account of the eradication of the buffalo and the founding of Yellowstone National Park.

Last Stand, by Michael PunkeIn Last Stand, Punke details early conservationist George Bird Grinnell’s battle to save both the bison and newly formed Yellowstone Park from hunters and powerful railroad interests.

It opens with a bang; Punke leads with a chilling account of a hunter killing 107 buffalo without leaving his stand, setting the stage for his narrative about the death of the American west.

A better story than most of the fiction I’ve read, Punke’s book focuses on George Bird Grinnell – a man largely responsible for the conservation of much of the American west, but whom remains mostly unknown today.

Opposing him were all the usual suspects: short-sightedness, a belief that the frontier was infinite, a desire to deal with the “Indian problem,” commercial interests, and of course, naked greed.

Punke does a commendable job of weaving together the myriad storylines affecting the west, connecting threads from Lewis & Clark to Custer to Bird’s battle against congressional inaction in the face of a strong railroad lobby.

George Bird – editor of Forest and Stream magazine – was an early convert to the cause of preserving the American west, and the climax of the book details his last-ditch efforts to preserve the handful of remaining buffalo.

With the help of a US Army Captain fighting a wave of poachers in the park, Bird marshaled his few allies in congress, beat back the railroad lobby (who wanted half of Yellowstone for their own use), and finally – with the help of an outraged public – succeeded in legislating protections against poaching in the National Parks.

The rapid decimation of the buffalo herds is a recurring (and distressing) theme in Punke’s book:

“The numbers paint the stark picture at the end. In 1882, the Northern Pacific Railroad alone shipped 200,000 hides to eastern processing facilities, an amount that filled an estimated 700 boxcars. In 1883, the railroad shipped 40,000 hides. In 1884, the total harvest fit in a single boxcar, and according to a Northern Pacific official, `it was the last shipment ever made.'”

Punke even details the lamentable efforts by many hunters to be the “last to kill a wild buffalo.”

Hunters acknowledged the damage done in pursuit of what quickly became a marginal commercial enterprise, but shrugged off the buffalo’s impending eradication and decided to get what they could while they could.

It’s impossible to read Last Stand without drawing some parallels to the perils facing today’s parks and wilderness areas – privatization, commercialization, and how to preserve wild game stocks in the face of encroaching domestic stocks.

Today, of course, the Old West is long gone, and the landscape surrounding Yellowstone National Park is populated with cattle, ranches, seasonal towns and hordes of automobile-bound tourists.

It’s all the more reason to read Punke’s interesting and compelling book, and anyone who has ever read an account of the Lewis & Clark expedition will likely find Last Stand an outstanding read.

Michael Punke threads his love of the wilds of the West throughout his informative, thought-provoking and insightful story of the buffalo and their interrleationship with the Native American population. He effectively evolved and linked this period to the issues with which we are dealing today. The author’s research served to illustrate and elaborate on the context of the time. I gained a great appreciation from the story for the challenges and significant accomplishments of George Bird Grinnell. The book should is a must read for all Americans to infuse a much needed political consciousness of what we have done and are doing to our western wildnerness and the native people and animals who inhabit it.